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May 18, 2007

Congress Works to Correct Nonsense in FCC Count of Broadband Users

The U.S. has ridiculous standards by which they count a broadband user: It's pretty absurd, but 200 Kbps in a single direction qualifies as a broadband line in our country. Now, that's just how the methodology is defined, and the methodology can be changed. There's now proposed legislation that would require 2 Mbps as the baseline for service to be counted as broadband, and revamp how counting in an area is performed. Right now, a single user in a Zip code tract--a tract that doesn't mesh with the USPS's Zip codes, according to some researchers--with broadband service means the entire Zip code region is counted as broadband-capable. The bill would also require the NTIA, our spectrum agency, to offer the information in searchable form.

The head of the cable industry association said that the industry was addressing concerns over broadband, noting that Comcast recently demonstrated 100 Mbps cable service. That's garbage, of course; the issue is about universal availability of broadband, not the speed in limited areas. By pretending that 200 Kbps is broadband, companies and lobbyists are allowed to talk about broadband generically, when better-than-dial-up is what's in place.

4 Comments

That is a superb point, Jason. But here's the deal. T-1 lines are typically tariffed data services that are charged on a particular schedule, and used for high-requirement business purposes. A T-1 line is symmetric 1.544 Mbps, where almost all standard consumer broadband is asymmetric. So T-1 is an aggregate of over 3.1 Mbps, where a 2 Mbps ADSL offering would probably have 384 Kbps or 768 Kbps upstream. DSL and cable duopolistic competition has seemed to spur ever better upload rates that are less asymmetric, or that have a minimum of 768 to 1.5 Mbps instead of previously acceptable 128 to 384 Kbps ranges.

So a T-1 might not fit into the definition of broadband, but broadband was originally defined as a term to use for home service, in opposition to narrowband service like a modem or even ISDN lines.

Another distinction used to be that a T-1 line could carry a service level agreement (SLA) with five nines of uptime and meet that target. DSL and cable used to be considered too unreliable for businesses to achieve that amount of uptime. That's changed somewhat, and there are definitely business SLAs for DSL; I don't know about cable.

Five nines of uptime, hah! I have a T1 coming into my house, and the SLA on it -- like the SLAs on *all* T1s I've investigated -- only counts when the problem is provably and definitively the fault of the ISP. But since the copper is Verizon's, the ISP always blames the telco, and gets out of having to provide any sort of recompense. (I've had FAR, far less than five nines of uptime, ever, in any year of the six years I've had a T1.)

[Editor's note: Key point -- T-1's *can* have five nines of uptime. It depends highly on circumstances. Some providers and some incumbents are better than others. This is another reason why wireless broadband for high-speed fixed links caugth on. -gf]

The real problem is with the name "broadband". We really should have another name for it, although I suppose it's a bit too late to change it now.

Here in Sweden, broadband in big cities is generally 2Mbit/s or above, but it can be as low as 512k if you live far out in the country. Still, it basically the same technology (some DSL) so having different names for it is kind of stupid. I'm assuming the situation is similar in other countries as far as differing speeds go. Also, some lucky people (like me) have high speed connections (100 Mbit/s) using Ethernet. Perhaps we should just call it by the technology used. Instead of a generic term called broadband, we should call it ADSL or T1 or Ethernet or whatever.